Marc du Plooy, Founder of Money-Sense

Money-Sense began in 2004 with a simple conviction that most households do not run short before month end through carelessness. They run short because nobody has ever shown them what a balanced budget looks like for a family in their circumstances. Marc built the original system that year and ran it through corporate and member programmes, most prominently Momentum Multiply, where more than 70,000 people used it to measure their spending against a household like their own. The service later went dormant as its sponsors' priorities moved elsewhere, with the lessons from those years shaping everything that has followed. In 2026 Marc rebuilt Money-Sense from the ground up, testing twenty years of South African household data line by line against Stats SA, DebtBusters and Old Mutual research before allowing a single number to drive a verdict.

That approach comes from a career spent in financial services as an internal auditor, investment manager and consultant. Marc holds the RE1, RE3 and RE5 regulatory qualifications and has worked for many years within the FAIS and FSCA frameworks that govern the industry. He founded Wealth Associates and grew the business through a series of acquisitions, an experience that informs his book Inside the Consolidation Game, a study of how consolidation is reshaping the financial advice industry.

Today Marc is a partner and director of FI Consult, a financial services advisory practice through which he works with asset managers, discretionary fund managers, aggregators and advisory businesses on mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, management buyouts, business valuations and the design of investment solutions. As a member of the Institute of Directors in South Africa he brings a boardroom perspective to how Money-Sense is offered to employers, as a measurable instrument a board can point to when asked what it is doing about the financial resilience of its own people.

Money-Sense carries the same discipline. It sells no product, earns nothing from what a household decides to do next and never asks for a name. Marc holds that people will only look honestly at their finances when nobody is watching and nothing is being sold. His aim is to place that honesty within reach of as many South African employees as possible, beginning with the employers willing to offer it to their people.